Anna Curtis Quantitative Reasoning Presentation Tuesday April 29 2003 Article Heterogeneity of Popular Boys Antisocial and Prosocial Configurations Thomas W Farmer Ruth Pearl Philip C Rodkin and Richard Van Acker Developmental Psychology Study This article focused on the social and intellectual habits of young boys in fourth through sixth grade N 452 By studying the personal qualities and personalities of each individual they classified which type of young boy was considered to be popular or not popular The process of categorization looked at trends including social behavior athleticism temper aggressiveness academic achievements and internal versus external tendencies Through individual peer and teacher evaluations each student was put in a category and then conclusions could be made regarding the trends found with each personality in the separate categories A second process of this study was to see if these findings were in anyway influenced by ethnicity and different ethnic surroundings Popular liked most Unpopular liked least Goals Section 1 Examine teacher evaluations Section 2 Evaluate the correspondence between peer s views and self evaluations Section 3 Examine the relationship between social standing in the classroom and ethnic background Hypothesis The characteristics of popular boys do not overlap with the characteristics of antisocial boys Categories Vocab POP Popularity popular with girls lots of friends OLY Olympian Physical Competence good at sports good looking wins a lot AFF Affiliative always smiles always friendly ACA Academic good at math good at spelling AGG Aggressive always argues gets in trouble always fights INT Internalizing always sad always worries SHY For teacher evaluations Model popular prosocial Tough popular antisocial Low academic average popular Passive average popular Bright antisocial unpopular antisocial Troubled unpopular antisocial Peer Personal Assessment Categories given to students to evaluate others Cooperative agreeable pitches in and shares gives everyone a turn good to have in a group Disruptive has a way of upsetting everything when in a group doesn t share bossy Acts shy hard to get to know Starts fights mean pushes other kids Leader gets chosen by others to be a leader in a group others like him to take charge Athletic good at outdoor games and sports Gets in trouble doesn t follow the rules doesn t pay attention and talks back to the teacher Good student makes good grades usually knows the answers and works hard in class Cool everybody knows this person ICS T Interpersonal Competence Scale Teacher ICS S Interpersonal Competence Scale Self SCM Social Cognitive Maps Configuration Membership and Social Centrality where they lie on the coolness scale within a group according to their peers o Nuclear members of prominent classroom peer groups o Secondary named to prominent groups less often than nuclear boys or in groups with moderate levels of prominence o Peripheral hardly ever named into classroom peer groups isolated Results This study was done to observe the different types of popularity among 4th 6th grade boys N 452 Model boys and tough boys were categorized via results of teacher evaluations compared to those evaluations performed by peers as well as the individuals These were studied in form of simple personality traits and also according to ethnicity The studies performed demonstrate that peers found model boys as cool athletic leaders cooperative studious not shy and aggressive They also found tough boys to be cool athletic and antisocial Within self evaluations model boys found themselves to be nonaggressive and academically strong Tough boys believed themselves to be popular aggressive and physically competent As far as ethnicity is concerned African Americans were predominantly tough boys especially when they were of the minority in their classrooms Model and tough boys were very present at nuclear levels of centrality which leads us to believe that aggressive boys can be some of the more popular and socially accepted children within the 4th 6th grades